The present invention relates to an automatic cash transaction apparatus used in a financial institution. More specifically, the present invention is directed to an automatic cash transaction apparatus capable of suitably handling bills.
In one conventional automatic cash transaction apparatus, bills deposited by a customer via a deposit port are separated one by one and the separated bills are discriminated. When the bills could not be judged as the genuine bills, or the normal bills during the discriminating process. Then, these bills are recognized as the abnormal bills, and these abnormal bills are conveyed to a payment port. To the contrary, when the bills could be recognized as the normal bills, all of these normal bills are temporarily stored into a stacker having a similar structure to that of a storage unit. As to bills, there are bills useable for a payment (namely, circulatable bills), and bills not useable for a payment (namely, uncirculatable bills). When the customer confirms a total amount of his deposited bills, the bills stored in the temporary stacker are again separated one by one, and the circulatable bills are stored in a circulatable bill storage unit whereas the uncirculatable bills are stored into an uncirculatable bill storage unit. When the customer cancels the deposit transaction, the bills stored in the temporary stacker are again separated one by one in a similar manner when the customer makes a confirmation. Then, the separated bills are returned to the payment port.
At this time, as in such an automatic cash transaction apparatus described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,478,992, in order that the bills stored in this transaction apparatus are correctly managed one by one, the characters or the symbols indicative of the features about all of the bills acquired into the transaction apparatus are read out. Then only the readable bills are stored into this transaction apparatus, and then the read information thereof is stored in the storing order.
During the payment, the bills are separated one by one from the circulatable bill storage unit, and then the separated circulatable bills are fed out therefrom so as to be discriminated. During the discriminating process operation, if each of these circulatable bills may own the feature defined as one sheet of bill, then this circulatable bill can be judged as the normal bill. The normal bill can be conveyed to the deposit/payment port for payment purposes. When the bill is judged as the abnormal bill, for example, such a bill whose sensor signal for extracting a feature of this bill represents an abnormal value, and such bills which are mistakenly conveyed in multiple mode, in shift manner, and in skew manner, this abnormal bill is not used for the payment, but is directly stored into a specific storage unit. After this cash transaction apparatus is turned OFF, a staff member confirms the total number and the amount sort of these abnormal bills stored in the storage unit.
As the uncirculatable bills, there are bills having heavy damage conditions, bills of certain amounts which are not originally used for payments, and foreign bills.
In the above-explained conventional automatic cash transaction apparatus, since the discriminated bills are stored into the temporary stacker without being separated into the circulatable bills and the uncirculatable bills, when these bills are conveyed from the temporary stacker to the deposit/payment port, or to the storage units, these conveyed bills must be again separated. However, during this reseparation operation, the following problem will occur. That is, the heavy damaged bills are bent, broken, or cut away. Otherwise, since the size of the temporary stacker is designed to be fitted to the largest-sized bill, the small-sized bills may cause skew problems, shift problems, and therefore paper jam problems.
Also, in the case that the above-described paper jam occurs, the customer cancels the transaction, or the customer has such a complaint that a total number/amount sorts of his deposited bills are not made coincident with those of the bills returned to the payment port, since only the characters and symbols of these bills are stored in the conventional automatic cash transaction apparatus, there is another problem that the customer could not receive satisfactory trouble reasoning from the staff members of the financial institution where this conventional automatic cash transaction apparatus is installed.
Furthermore, when the abnormal bills occur during payment, since the total number of the bills presently stored int the storage unit could not be grasped, there is a further problem that the automatic cash transaction apparatus should be interrupted while a certain limitation number is decided for the total number of bills stored in the storage unit.